Child Wonder Read online

  No, we weren’t.

  There was something wrong with both of the two prospective lodgers. Then a third came, who thought there was something wrong with the room. These setbacks were a blow to Mother’s confidence. Was the rent too high? Or too low? Before, she had talked about us having to move from Årvoll perhaps, to get something a bit simpler, in the area where she had lived earlier, perhaps, with her husband, in Øvre Foss, where people were still content with one room and a kitchen. But eventually a letter appeared, in spiky handwriting, from one Ingrid Olaussen, who was thirty-five years old and single, she wrote, she would like to see the room this Friday, if that were convenient?

  “Certainly,” Mother said.

  But then she took the drastic step of being absent the day after, when I returned from school with Anne-Berit and Essi.

  I had never encountered this before.

  A locked door. Which was not opened when I pressed the bell, again and again. This seriously threw me off-kilter. Essi took me to his place where his mother, who was one of the few mothers on whom I could rely, aside from my own, comforted me, saying Mother was sure to be out shopping, I would see, I could do my homework there in the meantime, with Essi, who needed some help in his struggle with spelling, he wasn’t much good at arithmetic, either.

  “You’re so clever, aren’t you, Finn.”

  Yes indeed, I was coping very well, it was part of the contract between Mother and me, the delicate balance in a family of two. I was given sliced bread with cervelat, which as a rule I relish, but I couldn’t get a mouthful down; the strange thing is that once you have had a mother, when she goes missing, this is no trifling matter. I sat beside Essi at his broad writing desk, holding a pencil, I was orphaned and didn’t write one single letter. This was so unlike her. More than an hour had passed now. (It was no more than fourteen minutes.) Only when almost two hours had passed did we hear a clatter on the road outside, which turned out to be the exhaust of a superannuated lorry trying to reverse up to the block of flats. Then I saw Mother jumping out of the driver’s cab in her long, flowery shoe-shop dress and running towards the entrance. On the burgundy vehicle’s doors it said “Storstein Møbler & Inventar” in gold-edged ornamental letters. A large man in a boiler suit let down the sides, another man jumped out and together they unveiled a sofa, a modern sofa bed in beige, yellow and brown stripes that Mother had gone out to buy on the flimsy basis of a letter from Ingrid Olaussen, and they hauled it off the lorry and started manoeuvring it towards the front door.

  By that time I already had my school bag on my back and was galloping at full speed down to the ground floor, across the grass and up the stairs following the unwieldy piece of furniture that the two men, with curses and one cry of distress, managed to coax up to the second floor and in through the door which had been locked for an eternity, now open for the first time in my life.

  Inside, Mother stood with a desperately strained expression on her face that came no closer to normality on catching sight of me, because of my wretched emotional state, no doubt, and at once began to apologise, “it had taken such a long time in the shop“. But there was no energy in her consoling words, and when she had signed a form and the new sofa was standing by the sitting-room wall where hitherto we had had nothing, but where actually it fitted very well, she had to lie down on it for a while. So did I. I lay beside her and drew in her fragrances and felt her arms around me as I instantly fell asleep: pansies, hair lacquer, shoe leather and 4711 eau de Cologne. I didn’t wake until two hours later, under a blanket, while Mother was making supper in the kitchen, humming, as she always did.

  There was no set dinner today, it was fried pork and eggs, the kind of supper that can still outdo any dinner. And over the meal she explained to me that there was something called H.P. which, in short, meant you didn’t have to save before you bought something, you could do it afterwards, which in turn meant there was a chance we wouldn’t need to wait so long to go and buy a bookcase either, not to mention one of those television sets that were invading the flats around us, so I wouldn’t have to run up to Essi’s every time there was something on which was not to be missed.

  These were indeed heady prospects. But there was something about her that evening that still made me uneasy, something that seemed to have collapsed inside her and with it had gone her composure and peace of mind, and I – who had just been through a traumatic experience of my own – did not sleep as well that night as I usually did.

  Next day I came straight back from school again, this time I found Mother at her post, ready to receive Ingrid Olaussen, and at once I got down to preparing myself, motivated by a number of reproving cautions, as though we were about to take an exam, they were quite unnecessary, it goes without saying, if there was anything I had taken on board, it was the seriousness of the matter.

  “Are you alright?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she said, going over to look at herself in the mirror, returning and growling: “You haven’t got some little scheme up your sleeve, have you?”

  I didn’t even know what she was referring to. And within no time at all she was herself again, shooting a sympathetic glance down at me, and saying she knew this wasn’t easy for me, but there was no alternative, did I realise that?

  I realised that.

  We were of one mind.

  Ingrid Olaussen arrived half an hour late and turned out to be employed at the hair salon in Lofthusveien, she looked the part too, like a twenty-year-old, even though she must have been Mother’s age. She had heaped-up, rust-red hair, with a little grey hat perched on top, adorned with a string of pearls, black droplets, so it looked as though her hair was crying. Furthermore, she smoked filter cigarettes, and it wasn’t just her handwriting that was spiky, casting an eye over the room she had the nerve to say:

  “Basic, right. Shouldn’t you have said that in the ad?”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but Mother’s face went through three or four familiar stages before she blurted out that it was easy for someone who didn’t have a clue what it cost to put ads in the newspaper to say that.

  Confronted with which statement, Ingrid Olaussen just took a long drag on her cigarette and cast around for an ashtray. But none was offered. Now Mother wanted to call off the whole business, and said that in fact we had changed our minds and needed the room ourselves.

  “Sorry you’ve come on a wild goose chase.”

  She even opened the front door for her. But then all of a sudden Ingrid Olaussen looked deeply unhappy. Her coiffed head slumped to her bosom, and her long, ungainly body began to sway.

  “Goodness gracious, don’t you feel well?”

  Mother led her by the coat sleeve into the sitting room, sat her down on the new sofa and asked if she wanted a glass of water or a cup of coffee.

  Then something even more incomprehensible happened. Ingrid Olaussen did want a cup of coffee, yes, she did, but before Mother managed to put on the kettle, she began to intertwine her long, slender fingers, as if splicing two ends of a rope, and spoke in a staccato manner, and at quite a speed, about her job, about demanding customers, as far as I was able to gather, who were always after her with all manner of criticism, not to mention the condescending owner, she also brought up a matter which made Mother totally change character and shoo me into the bedroom before I could glean any further clarification.

  Through the door I heard talking, intense mumbling and what sounded like crying.

  As time went on, they seemed to be on the verge of reaching agreement, there was even some hysterical laughter. And when at last Mother opened the door, I thought they had become the best of friends. Instead it turned out that Ingrid Olaussen had departed, leaving Mother more thoughtful than ever as she prepared dinner.

  “Isn’t she going to live here?” I asked.

  “No, she will not, I can promise you that,” she said. “She hasn’t got two øre to rub together. Her life is all over the place. And she’s not even called Ingrid
Olaussen, either …”

  I wanted to ask how Mother could know all of this. Or to enquire how a total stranger might open her heart to her in this way. But a strange unease had settled over me in the course of the half hour I had spent in the bedroom, and the answers to the two questions must have been that Mother already knew her or she recognised herself in this woman. I didn’t want to hear confirmation of either, I preferred to concentrate on my food, but was nevertheless left with a quite tangible feeling that there were sides to Mother of which I had little understanding, not just her sudden absence the day before, on Thursday, for which ultimately there was a reason, a sofa, but the fact that a total stranger could enter our hitherto uneventful but now over-renovated home life, break down on the new sofa, divest herself of all her secrets and then be chased away again; I was not only facing an insoluble riddle but a riddle to which I perhaps never wanted to find a solution.

  I sat stealing furtive glances at her, my nervous, frightened of the dark but on the whole so stable and immortal mother, my bedrock on earth and my fortress in heaven, now wearing an unrecognisable face.

  3

  The lodger project was now put on hold for a few weeks, as though Mother was afraid to have a new mystery darken her door. But, as I mentioned before, we had committed ourselves to an agreement to save backwards, so there was no option but to put another advertisement in the Arbeiderbladet, at fifty øre a word. She was still testy and distracted: she put the wrong things on my slices of bread, she didn’t listen when I was telling her things and she lost her place when she was reading aloud in the evenings.

  “Anyway you can read better than I can now,” she said defensively when I protested. But that was not why I had learned to read, we had a heap of books, and we were going to read them all, children’s books, Margit Söderholm, the Jalna series, an encyclopaedia called Heimskringla and Captain Marryat’s Peter Simple, as well as one solitary book left by my father, a Finnish book entitled The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna which we had not read yet and which, according to Mother, we had no plans to read, all piled up in a box in my bedroom waiting for the bookcase which we would buy on credit, if only we could hook this damned lodger of ours. And it was on one of those occasions when she wasn’t listening that it struck me I was someone else, I had changed. It wasn’t a clear or a palpable feeling, but intrusive enough all the same for me to ask:

  “Which of us are you talking to now: me or him over there?”

  This did not go down well.

  “What do you mean?” she snapped, and lectured me about my being quite incomprehensible at times, a lecture she had delivered once or twice before, perhaps it had something to do with my being aboy and her thinking life would have been easier with a daughter.

  “I don’t understand what you’re on about,” I said, ill-humouredly, and went into my room to lie down on the bed to read in peace, a Jukan comic. But, as is the case with protest reading in general, I couldn’t concentrate, I just got angrier and angrier lying there with my clothes on, wondering how long a small boy has to lie like that waiting for his mother to come to her senses and assure him that nothing has changed, irrespective of whether Yuri Gagarin has blown us all sky high. As a rule it does not take very long, not in this house at least, but this time, oddly enough, I fell asleep in the middle of my rage.

  It wasn’t until next morning that I discovered she must have been there, as I was in my pyjamas and under the duvet. I got out of bed, dressed and went to the kitchen. We had breakfast as usual and laughed at some chicken-brain on the radio using words like “baritone” and “U Thant”. Nonetheless, there was an irritating distance about her that meant we couldn’t quite resolve our differences, I felt, as the door across the corridor slammed and I put on my peau de pêche jacket and my school bag and shuffled off to school with Anne-Berit.

  So had I perhaps changed after all?

  Anne-Berit, at all events, had not changed. I have never known a person to avail herself to such an extent of the opportunity to be herself: pretty, self-assured and unimaginative; there was not a trace of her lumpen parents in her, she was never the one to come up with any fun things to do and never laughed until she was sure there was something to laugh at, which as a rule there wasn’t. But today all this was fine, in a way, for while I was usually the one to say something, neither of us said anything, and the silence became so oppressive that she said:

  “What’s up with you?”

  I still didn’t have much to say in reply, we just continued down the grey beaten-earth paths in Muselunden, which according to both Mother and fru Syversen were much safer than the pavement along Trondhjemsveien, even though it was here on the slope down to the road that the tramps made their homes, in small ramshackle huts which in the black, leafless wilderness of late autumn were very visible from all sides, resembling blood-spattered wreckage after a plane crash. Some scary men lived here, whom we called Yellow, Red and Black because Yellow suffered from some illness that had turned him yellow, Red was always red-faced and Black was as swarthy as a gypsy, as we say. We just had to make sure we didn’t go into their huts when they called, because if you did they would chuck you in a mill and grind you into thin brown gruel and make stock cubes out of you. But none of that was relevant today, they weren’t even anywhere in sight, so they didn’t give me anything to talk about either, and I was in a mood to lose my temper with someone.

  “Huh, you’re so boring,” I said to Anne-Berit as we entered the school playground. To which she replied: “Piss off.”

  This is not a usual mode of utterance on her part, although it is not out of keeping with her temperament, so we parted on unfriendly terms, she on her way to the girls’ class, and I to the mixed class which had been set up to determine whether it was possible for boys and girls to sit beside each other and learn something at the same time.

  Being in a mixed class felt good, even though the prettiest girls were in the other one, of course it is often the case that the better you know people the more faults you find in them. But here I could rest my eyes on the blazing black hair of Tanja, who was still a bit of a mystery to me because she never said anything and answered questions in a voice whose volume even frøken Henriksen despaired of trying to turn up. But she turned round every time I said something and sent me little smiles, which made me feel that there was nothing else to live for; some said she was a gypsy and lived in a circus caravan outside the botanical gardens in Tøyen, and that didn’t make matters any easier, for what could be more alluring than people who travel the world with a guitar, steal things and operate merry-go-rounds?

  Matters had reached such a pass now that I put up my hand primarily to make Tanja turn round, a move I also tried today, on top of which I wanted to get rid of all the mess that was still churning around in my head. But instead of showing off with some witticism, I realised too late that for once I had not done my homework and burst into a terrible and incomprehensible fit of tears. Once it had started it was impossible to control, I lay hunched over my desktop like an idiot, bawling my eyes out, oddly enough under no illusions, even then, that this was going to cost me dear, and that didn’t make matters easier, either.

  “Goodness me, Finn, what has happened?”

  “I don’t know!” I howled, which was true, and an answer which, by the way, I was more than happy with, because what if I had blurted out the truth: there’s something up with Mother!

  Frøken Henriksen took me into the corridor and calmed me down enough for me to be able to comprehend what she was saying: she was going to send me home with a letter to make sure that everything was alright. But I objected with such vehemence – and another torrent of tears – that once again she had to wait until I had composed myself. I sat slumped against the wall staring down the deserted corridor, which conjured up the image of a hospital where all the children laugh without making a noise and the dead have already acquired wings, and frøken Henriksen, with whom by and large I had a good relationship, suddenly sai
d:

  “Have you seen something?” I gave a start.

  “Seen what?”

  “No, no, I just wondered whether perhaps you might have … seen something.”

  “Seen what?” I shouted again as the abyss beneath me opened wider, Mother had not only become distant and different, maybe I had also known, maybe I could have predicted it. “I haven’t seen a bloody thing!” I yelled.

  “Take it easy now, Finn,” frøken Henriksen said, no longer quite so comforting, lethargic rather, and I sat there with some sudden memories or words in my head, we collected words, Mother and I did, and laughed at them and liked them or thought them silly or redundant, words that were so real you could touch them, like “concrete”, “exhaust”, “piassava broom”, “petrol”, “leather”, “shoe leather” … I fell into a reverie imagining myself desperate to go tobogganing, on my new sledge, and crying and pestering until Mother took me by the hand and dragged me roughly along towards the slope that ran all the way from Trondhjemsveien down to the estate; there was no longer a clear meandering river of cold glass, but a brown muddy track like a coagulated nose-bleed on a battered face.

  “Do you understand now?” she shouted, making my ears ring. “The winter’s over! It’s spring!”

  “Shall we go back in?” frøken Henriksen said.

  I looked up at her.

  “Yes,” I said, getting to my feet and trying to look as if in the last few minutes we had come to an agreement that nothing at all had happened.